“But must I leave?” asked Wilton, appealingly.
“It must be so, Wilton; I shall be sorry for you, but it must be settled so. Can you manage it?”
“O yes,” said Wilton, crying quietly; “I’ll write home and tell my poor mother all about it, and then of course she’ll send me some money and take me away at once, to save me from being expelled. My poor mother, how wretched it will make her!”
“Sin makes us all wretched, Raven boy. I’m sure it makes me wretched enough. And that you mayn’t think that fear has had anything to do with our letting you off, I must tell you, Wilton, that I’ve been to Dr Lane himself and told him all the many sins I’ve been guilty of.”
“Have you? Oh! I’m so sorry; it was all through me.”
“Yes; but I’m not sorry; I’m all the happier for it, Raven. There’s nothing so miserable as undiscovered sin—is there?”
“Oh, indeed, there isn’t. I’m sure I feel happier now in spite of all. No one knows, Ken, how I’ve suffered this last fortnight. I’ve been in a perpetual fright; I’ve had fearful dreams; I’ve felt ready to sink for shame; and I’ve always been fancying that fellows suspected me. Do you know, I am almost glad you caught me, Ken. I’m very glad it was you and no one else, though it was a horrid, horrid moment when you laid your hand on my shoulder. Yet even this isn’t so bad as to have gone on nursing the guilt secretly, and not to have been detected.”
Kenrick was musing; the boy who could talk like that was clearly one who might have been, very unlike what Wilton then was.
“Wilton,” he said, “come here and draw your chair by mine while I read you a little story.”
“O Ken, I’m so grateful that you don’t hate and despise me though I am a—”; he murmured the word “thief” with a shudder, and under his breath, as he drew up his chair, and Kenrick read to him in a low voice the story of Achan, till he came to the verses—